


Someone in a Tree

by volunteerfd



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Animals, Cats, Children
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-28
Updated: 2015-06-30
Packaged: 2018-04-06 13:14:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4223070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/volunteerfd/pseuds/volunteerfd
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Old women, animals, and children love Wesley. He doesn't feel the same way. Unfortunately, it's good for business.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I have a headcanon: Wesley goes out of his way to be nice to children and animals but deep down he hates them. He’s not one of those bad guys with a secret soft spot. He really hates interacting with them. He’s been tempted to fake an allergy, but pretending to be nice is better for appearances.
> 
> The other part of that headcanon is that children and animals love Wesley.

Wesley always smiled at children crossing his path. Strange dogs would tug at their leashes just to say hello to him, tear out of their owner’s grasp to jump up and slobber all over their new friend, and he would smile and rub their necks. Even the most aloof cat would rub against his leg, leaving hair all over his pants. He knew to put his hand out and let the cat do all the work with regards to petting.

He hated them. He knew for a fact that dogs ate dirt and licked him in the same breath. Cats were always seconds away from coughing up hairballs. And children. God. Their hands were always sticky. Why was that? And how? And didn’t their parents care? 

This sanctified trinity was supposed to be prescient, good judges of characters. That’s how it was in movies. Children knew when someone was a little off. Cats hissed at people who weren’t what they appeared to be. In real life, though, Wesley charmed alleged guard dogs while he whisked the owner away to be creatively questioned. They wagged their tails at him, and Wesley gave them a Snausage for their cooperation. And children always begged him to fingerpaint. What was their obsession with fingerpainting? It was a messier, more inconvenient form of real painting. Was that why their hands were always sticky?

But Wesley put up with it because it paid off in spades. With the approval of dogs and cats and children, he was the epitome of virtue. So he scratched the damn cats ears and…God, he played dollhouse with children when the situation called for it.

The only people who loved Wesley more were the elderly. Old women in particular. They ate him up. Had an endless procession of beautiful daughters and granddaughters for him. He would chuckle and never outright decline, but they had to ask: Why would such a handsome, well-dressed young man be without a woman? I have a son, too. He’s single if, you know. If that’s what you are.

The old women wanted Wesley in their lives by any means necessary. That’s how he wound up essentially babysitting a Mafia consigliere’s mother. On Staten Island.

When Wilson Fisk told him the assignment, he smiled his congenial teeth-baring smile that convinced everyone, excluding himself, that he was not at all thinking of murder, of course not.

“Isn’t there someone more adept to temporarily guard her?” 

“She asked specifically for you.”

Wesley’s smile didn’t falter, but his eye twitched.

“It’s a gesture of good will,” Fisk explained.

She lived in a rusty old house that probably cost as much as her son had in his pocket. The panels were falling off the house. The porch steps creaked, and he had to watch his step because mold was eating most of the wood and his foot might go right through. And it was on Staten Island.

Wesley hated Manhattan. He couldn’t begin to articulate his feelings on Staten Island.

Inside, Wesley couldn’t tell if the wallpaper was fading or if it was just wall. She had the most horrifying collection of porcelain clowns on every available surface. They were in the obvious spots: the fireplace, the table, the bookcase. But then there were some lurking in corners, high up 

“What a charming home you have,” he said. “What utterly precious clowns.” He said this in Italian, and she responded in Italian, something about his charm and her daughter. 

The worst part was the cat. As far as nasty-looking cats went–and Wesley found all cats nasty–this cat was the stuff of nightmares. He was a grizzled tom with chewed ears and a missing eye and what had to have been battle scars, Hair missing in patches. What little teeth he had left were yellowed, but sharp.

He rubbed himself right up against Wesley’s leg, doing figure-eights as Wesley knelt down to stroke him.

“And who’s this little kitty?” Wesley asked. 

“Ah! He never likes anyone!”

They spent the afternoon conversing in Italian. Wesley politely ate the stale cookies she offered. They were terrible, and he was disappointed in Italy because of them. 

The conversation–perhaps the least bad part of this entire thing–came to an abrupt stop when she realized her cat was gone.

Wesley’s first thought was that the cat was probably dead.

“Maybe he’s in the backyard,” he said. 

The woman ran to the backyard, which was slower than Wesley’s normal stride, but he could still tell she was moving urgently and with purpose. The cat was in a tree. 

“Please, Mr. Wesley, I can’t get him down by myself! Could you? You’re tall and you like the cat very much.”

Wesley looked up at the cat. He did not want to rescue the damn cat from a tree like a firefighter in a Hanna Barbera cartoon. He did not want to scuff his shoes. He could probably bribe the president of PETA to eat the cat on live television for how much he spent on his shoes. In fact, he would rather do that than have to spend more time with that scabby cat. 

This was a very important business connection, though. A gesture of good will, Fisk said. 

“Of course I’ll help your kitty,” he said, baring his teeth.


	2. Chapter 2

Wesley believed that international drug dealing was one of those things people should give up when they became parents. He was old fashioned like that. But it was not his position to question the lifestyle choices of his business partners.

It was hard to imagine that these people, this frazzled mom with a too-long fringe cut straight across her forehead and this suburban dad (who Wesley knew for a fact had a “WORLD’S BEST DAD” t-shirt, not that he was wearing it now), were once–and still were–two of the most notorious criminals in Eastern Europe and the United States. And yet, here they were.

The last time Fisk and Wesley had met them, it was in a playground, an honest-to-god playground. Now, luckily, they were in an adult restaurant, the type of place organized criminals should meet and where they could enjoy a nice bottle of wine.

The meeting was going very well, Wesley feeling warm and flush as the couple droned about their kids. He let himself zone out just a little for this portion of the night. Children.

“If we are to move forward with our plans, we’ll need a babysitter.”

“Well,” Wesley smiled, thinking the man was making some sort of self-deprecating joke, “I’m sure we can find one in the tri-state area.”

“Actually,” he said, and Wesley felt time stop. Something bad was about to happen. “My kids don’t usually take to adults. They’re with their grandmother tonight, but she’s getting old and they’re a handful for her. But they like you. Very much.”

Oh, right. The meeting at the playground, two kids running around their feet as they discussed how best to dispose of certain obstacles. They were screeching, bumping into the adults’ legs, and wasn’t there a safety issue or something to have kids this close to nefarious plotting? Mostly it was the shrieking that got to Wesley, his eyebrows quirking just slightly whenever there was a screech. He prided himself on his attentiveness, but it was hard to be at full form with a constant ringing in his ears.

Wesley politely excused himself from the conversation, leaned forward, and got the kids’ attention.

“You know, I think there’s some buried treasure in this park. I’m not sure where it is exactly, but it’s somewhere–” he gestured off in the distance to a sandbox in their line of sight but far enough away that they would not be a distraction. “–there.”

“Buried treasure?” The girl’s eyes widened. The boy used this split second to get a running head start. She chased after him.

“Now, where were we?”

The rest of the meeting resumed and concluded smoothly. They stood, shook hands, and the children came running back. The girl held out her hands to Wesley.

“Is this it?” she asked. “Is this the treasure?” It was a cheap plastic-and-string bracelet, trash before it was even dropped on the ground.

“Wow! It is!” Wesley did not want to touch it. “Why don’t you keep it? You earned it, after all.”

She turned to her brother and gave him the smuggest grin. “I told you this was the treasure!”

And now, that single moment of quick-thinking was coming back to bite him. It had been so insignificant; he’d pushed the unpleasant experience of dealing with children out of his mind.

“Don’t you think my skills would be better utilized on the more business end of things?” He looked at Wilson, smile never wavering, but hoping Wilson would get the point and intercede. After all, having him babysit was ridiculous. He spoke seventeen languages.

“I think you can sit one night out,” Wilson smiled and patted Wesley’s knee under the table, just a brief second, like a husband trying to placate his wife. Is my employer mimicking the behavior of the domestic New Jersey couple? Wesley practically had to hold his eyebrows in place.

Wesley nodded. “Of course.”

******

Wesley never had formal training in dealing with children, but that was just as well. He performed more than admirably just flying on autopilot. Too well, if you asked him. The girl seemed to be waiting for Wesley, expecting him, because as soon as the door opened, she was running from the stairwell and hugging his legs. They completely ignored Wilson, who trailed behind Wesley.

“Wesley’s back!”

“And who is this?” Wesley said, kneeling down, acting like he was pretending not to remember the girl’s name even though he actually did not remember it. She giggled.

“Alana!”

“Alana! Right! How could I forget?” He smacked his forehead and she laughed again.

He hated kids. Yes, most of his life was performance. He had to switch between deadly to charming to deadly and back, and everything in between, constantly reading an audience of one or two or twelve or more. At least that required skill and subtlety. Children, though, needed pantomime: a complete lack of skill and subtlety, nothing to be proud of. He was a well-dressed clown with a ridiculously expensive watch.

Her brother came running, too, and Wesley crouched down and did the fake-forget-the-name (but-no-actually-he-did-forget) bit with him. “It’s JEREMY!”

Wilson smiled down at Wesley.

“Mom and Dad told me you’re going to be our babysitter tonight! Is that true?”

Wesley held back his cringe. Before he could think of an annoyingly cutesy response, their parents descended the staircase.

“Yes, Jeremy. You’ll be staying with Wesley tonight,” his mother said.

Their parents looked like a suburban couple going out for the night, their rare chance to have a naughty suburban couple sex life, their fleeting moment to feel young and childless. They were probably going to have to kill someone tonight, but Wesley would find out later.

Wesley stood again, unfolding his too-long limbs from the uncomfortable crouching position.

“You look wonderful,” he said, kissing her hand, chaste as a eunuch but duly polite. She blushed.

“Thank you, Wesley. Call us if there’s any trouble.”

******

“We’re hungry!” The kids shouted.

Hunger, right, that was something children felt. He looked hopelessly around the kitchen for some sort of feeding instructions, but he couldn’t find any. For a second, he thought that maybe he should call, but no, figuring things out was his job.

“What do you usually eat?”

“CHICKEN NUGGETS!”

Instead of covering his ears, he smiled more broadly.

“Chicken nuggets! Wow! Great! Where are they?” He swung open the freezer door and saw a huge green and purple box taking up most of the space. Dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets. Why were they shaped like dinosaurs? Why not, crazy idea, chickens? Or the form they were intended to be in, whatever that was?

He frowned over the box. There were microwave instructions and oven instructions, but he wasn’t sure which to choose. Putting them in the oven would be cooking them like they were real food, but it also took five times longer. He just pulled the plastic bag out of the box–a lot of protection for something that was, essentially, fake sustenance created in a lab to sell cheap and last forever–and shook it over a paper plate. Two, four–

How many did they need?

“How many of these, uh, chicken nuggets do you usually eat?”

“A BILLION!” Alana exclaimed.

“A billion? OK. Wait, there’s not a billion in here. How about–” he flipped the box over, read the serving size. “–four? Does that sound like a good number?”

“OK.”

Four sounded like such an arbitrary number, like three was too few, the minimum to establish a pattern, and five would be too much, maybe lethal. Wesley tossed them in the microwave.

He had to play with dolls. This was something else he had to do on auto-pilot in an uncomfortably squashed position in a little girl’s room. Luckily, Jeremy had no problems playing with dolls. Jeremy and Alana enacted their own little scenes and Wesley took orders from them–”No, that’s Prince ERIC, you need PRINCE CHARMING!” 

For siblings, they got along well. No arguments, no fighting. Wesley was grateful for that. Consoling a crying child would be a test he wasn’t sure he could magic himself out of.

“I have to show you something!” Alana said abruptly, dropping one of the blonde dolls in front of her and walking to her dresser. Wesley was a little baffled. She abandoned the scene mid-sentence. Did this mean it was over? Did he not have to play with dolls anymore? But how could she just leave something unfinished…

She came back with something clutched in her fist. Wesley took a moment to remember: the bracelet from the playground. 

“I protected the treasure!”

This was supposed to be touching, he supposed. He was supposed to be touched. Mostly, he was upset that this little girl was keeping trash in her drawer. 

“It’s not my treasure,” he said, eyes thoughtful, tone carefully reverent. “It’s yours.”

Please keep it, he thought.


End file.
